History of Political Though
14/02/2016
A Shabby Chain Indeed
Human society has the potential to achieve liberty when people work together to form a society in which equality means more than negative liberty: the absolute and protected right to run races against each other to determine winners. Idealists imagine a … liberty that enables us to build together toward common objectives that fulfill and even surpass our individual goals. (Macpherson)
This is a very bold statement, and I say such in the most positive tone I can muster. Humans as a race are absolutely bursting with potential, and out of that raw potential has been bred these things known as government and society which are themselves bursting with potential. Some form of societies, however primitive, were necessary constructions, given our biological and psychological construction. But certainly such advanced societies, as are the sprawling urban megalopolises which litter the globe today, were contingent upon the factor to which we chose to utilize our potential more so than otherwise. What exactly is it what I am suggesting when I, in the immortal words of C.B. Macpherson, make such a claim? Well, this will require a few definitions of the working terms before I am able to clearly communicate why it is that “[h]uman society has the potential to achieve liberty when people work together to create a society in which equality means more than negative liberty” (Macpherson).
Negative Liberty
Negative liberty is best thought of as ‘oppressive freedom’. Isaiah Berlin says “if a man is too poor to afford something on which there is no legal ban – a loaf of bread, a journey round the world, recourse to the law courts – he is as little free to have it as if it were forbidden him by law . . . [his] inability to get given a thing is due to the fact that other human beings have made arrangements whereby [he is], whereas others are not, prevented from having enough money with which to pay for it”. Easily is such a concept viewed in today’s western state: big corporations paying the way in political campaigns (McMahone) in an effort to have their corporate views and desires considered ahead of the rest of the population’s views and desires. For many people this is a concern of motivation. If we consider the corporate donors as the ‘upper class’ we see they measured 3.6% of the population in the United States in 2008 (Lard Bucket). The same area at the same time had 43.4% middle class citizens, whom arguably could have donated to political campaigns, if they chose to, in order to have their views and desires hiked up the totem pole a few degrees. We do not begin to see the utter stratification until we observe the 45.7% of working class citizens, and the 7.3% of lower class citizens (Lard Bucket) in the same time period. By definition, the working and lower classes do not have the spare capital required to, in this case, donate to a political campaign. What one is able to observe about the state of affairs in the above situation is that 53% of the population does not have the required capital to invest in politics, and therefore 53%, a statutory majority, of people are having their views and desires restrained by the actions of the wealthy. This lower 53% of people have the same liberties under their capitalist political system as do the 3.6% whom comprise the upper class; but due to the distribution of wealth this lower 53% is not able to exercise those rights. They have these rights which they are unable to utilize because of the varying consequences of that same set of capitalist rights, such as gross socio-economic stratification throughout the state. What then may we consider an un-utilizable right? Denotatively it is a right all the same, yet connotatively it appears to be a constraint. This is what is meant by negative liberty. The specific example is a token-distinction of negative liberty, and the system which allows such tokens to occur is a type-distinction of negative liberty. I will be concerned with the type-distinction hereforth.
Natural Liberty
The next type of liberty we ought to examine is natural liberty. Natural liberty is simply the freedom to think and act as one pleases, without the fear of a higher power discovering one’s deeds/thoughts and exacting retribution upon them for experiencing such desires and/or performing such actions. This is the type of liberty experienced before civilized governments came to be, and this is also the type of liberty experienced in an anarchist state. Clearly however, there are some concerns with the practice of natural liberty. If all men have a right to all things, then no man has a right to anything; for I have a right to my life and my body, yet so too does the next man have a right to the same (Hobbes). It was out of such concerns from which the need for positive liberty hails.
(Positive) Liberty
What then is positive liberty? I think it is put beautifully by the Baron of Montesquieu, Charles Secondat:
[Positive] liberty . . . is a tranquility of the mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety. In order to have this liberty, it is requisite the government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another . . . [It] does not consist in unlimited freedom. We must have continually present to our minds the difference between independence [[natural liberty]] and liberty.
As is phrased above, positive liberty is a regulated and constrained form of natural liberty. It is a freedom to think and act as one pleases, without the fear of a higher power discovering one’s deeds/thoughts and exacting retribution upon them for experiencing such desires and/or performing such actions so long as one’s thoughts and actions do not inhibit the liberties of others to enjoy the same. In order to clarify the distinction I feel the need to point out that by hoarding resources to themselves (money, influence, power) the upper class is indirectly inhibiting the liberties of others to enjoy the same. And not just a few people find themselves within these constraints, as we discussed previously: over half of the population in America are within these constraints to their liberty.
The Difference
Positive liberty is the most commonly considered type of liberty, and is often mistaken for the only type of liberty, as though there is only Liberty or Not-Liberty; perhaps more accurately as though there are only varying degrees of liberty and the further along the spectrum one observes, the more ‘liberal’ it is. This is not entirely inaccurate, for there does seem to be some sort of a spectrum. The true nature of the spectrum of liberty however, seems to be inversed when compared to its folk-counterpart. Positive liberty inherently contains this restriction that what I do must not interfere with the abilities of others to enjoy the same liberties: everybody is restrained in order to allow everybody to be at equal liberty. Next along the spectrum we find negative liberty, wherein this restraint of all is replaced by a lesser restraint: everybody is kind of restrained in order to allow a minority to experience extreme liberty, while the majority experience a suppression of their liberties. Further yet along the spectrum we find natural liberty, wherein all restraints are removed: everybody is absolutely free to do unto others as they see fit, and so therefore no one is at liberty. If we follow this logic it is plain to see that the more society is restrained from infringing upon one another the freer we all become as a result. It is but a fool’s mathematics which would think that a minority having extreme liberty is of greater a sum than the whole having equal liberty. In dialectic support of my argument, I offer the following quotation: “[a]t Genoa, the word ‘Liberty’ may be read over the front of prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent citizens from being free. In the country in which all men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed” (Rousseau 278).
Equality
Equality is not the right of each to out-run, or out-compete, or out-produce all others. Equality is not as abstract as that. Equality is a concrete state: all persons are equal. Therefore all persons deserve to be treated as equal to one another, and therefore should some persons be suppressing the abilities of others to live their lives to par, then this is not equality. Equality is requiring of a certain, general compassion for the well-being of others. We live in an individualistic, negatively liberal, consumer culture wherein greed is rewarded; but these rewards serve to feed our short-term requirements and desires, and these rewards blind us to the true nature of the societies we live in. If we were to look out beyond the petty wishes of our self-driven-motivations we would see the true potential power of the systems which we comprise.
Conclusion
A society is a common-wealth, it is formed to best serve the common-good of the common-people and whatever it is you believe that you are, I am here to remind you that you are a common-person. No one person, of the vast states we live within, is better than any other; we all work together to protect one another and enforce each other’s common-interest. This is the reason why your neighbour will call the police if he sees someone breaking into your house, and this is the reason that people enter your store expecting to offer you money for your products and services: because these are stipulations which we have all implicitly agreed to in order to preserve the common-good. Think twice before you claim to have done anything ‘on your own’, because you live in a vast society and are being assisted by the denizens of that society every day; often you do not know you are being helped by them, and often they do not realize they are helping you. Perhaps their intentions are selfishly-motivated, but that does not detract from the fact that their selfish-motivations help you to succeed. An employee comes to work each day for, typically, selfish-motivations, but that does not detract from the assistance he provides to your company. Such assistance is worth money to you in fact, and you pay the employee to continue to assist you in the future. What then is so different about societal-assistance? Why do we not pay everyone in society for unknowingly helping us to succeed? Perhaps because we do not have the money to pay for the assistance of even a small community, let alone an entire society. But perhaps we need not pay them directly, perhaps all we need afford them is the ability to pay themselves? Perhaps it is in everyone’s ‘self-interest’ to accept more stringent restrictions upon their personal liberties in order to attain a freer state? As the old idiom goes: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link; therefore if a chains weakest link is quite weak, then the entire chain is quite weak as a whole, because it is a system which is dependent upon each of the individual parts of itself. What then might this mean for a chain of which 53% of its links are weak? I am compelled to admit that such a chain seems quite shabby indeed.
Works Cited
Berlin, Isaiah. “Two Concepts of Liberty”. The Idea of Freedom, ed. Alan Ryan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. 175 – 93. PDF.
Hobbes, Thomas. “Of the Liberty of Subjects”. Leviathan. Penguin Books Ltd: 1985. Strand, London. Print.
Macpherson, C.B. “Introduction” to Robert Meynell, Canadian Idealism and the Philosophy of Freedom (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011), pp. xi – xii.
McMahone, Tamsin. “Political Donations: How parties pay the rent”. National Post. April 23, 2011. 03/03/2016. Web. URL = http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/political-donations-in-canada
N.a. “Subjective Social Class Membership”. Lard Bucket. 2008. 03/03/2016. Web. URL = http://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/sociology-comprehensive-edition/s11-03-social-class-in-the-united-sta.html
Rousseau, Jean-Jaques. “The Social Contract”. Trans. G.D.H. Cole. The Social Contract And Discourses. Ed. P.D. Jimack. Tuttle Publishing, North Clarendon, VT, USA: 1993. Print.
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